`Hitcher` Packed With Style, Action

February 24, 1986|By Bill Kelley, Entertainment Writer

All style and no content isn`t quite an accurate description of The Hitcher, but it comes close. You can`t say that a movie in which people are dismembered, shot, set on fire and torn to pieces has no content. And you may not want to say it has style. But you do have to admit it`s alive and it moves -- ferociously.

The Hitcher is about a young man, Jim Halsey (C. Thomas Howell), who picks up a hitchhiker during a cross-country drive, and soon has about a hundred reasons to wish he hadn`t. The hitchhiker, John Ryder (the character`s name is the first of several groan-producing touches of errant symbolism in the film), places a switchblade to Jim`s cheek and sweetly tells him he plans to cut off Jim`s head and limbs -- just as he did to the owner of an abandoned car they passed several miles earlier.

Rutger Hauer, a handsome, accomplished character actor (Nighthawks, The Osterman Weekend ), plays Ryder, and one of the obstacles the film never overcomes is that it has no comparably strong actor to match skills with him. Howell takes a beating as Jim (who boots Ryder out of his car in the opening scene and spends the rest of the movie dodging him), but he doesn`t contribute anything distinctive, and I found myself admiring his stamina, not his acting. Hauer, who is clearly having a grand time executing each of Ryder`s atrocities, upstages everyone in sight while still managing to give a disciplined performance.

Eric Red`s screenplay suggests that, as the chase continues, a macabre bond is fused between Ryder and Jim. But neither he nor the director, Robert Harmon, develops it, and one senses that this is because they don`t know how. Harmon, a former cameraman, gives the film a haunting visual texture -- scary without being pretentious -- and it is difficult to recall a more vicious villain than the one Red`s script provides. But toward the end, when the plot has nowhere left to go and answers are called for, the film simply becomes irritatingly vague.

Jennifer Jason Leigh makes a brief, effective appearance as a bored waitress who is dragged into the chase near its end. She becomes the focus of Ryder`s revenge against Jim for abandoning him, which technically makes her more than a token female presence in a macho adventure movie. Ryder`s intentions toward her are perfectly in keeping with the genre, however.

The Hitcher`s ideal audience is suspense lovers who want a violent ride and don`t mind that it ultimately takes them nowhere. Anyone else is likely to be disappointed.

THE HITCHER (2 STARS)

A psychopathic hitchhiker goes on a murder spree in the desolate Southwest.